Bauble economy / Does a fictional story written about a cheap thrift-store object make it more valuable?

Rob Baedeker, Special to SF Gate

Published 4:00 am, Monday, August 17, 2009

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The Fop figurine.

The Fop figurine.

Photo: Courtesy Of Significant Objects

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Bauble economy / Does a fictional story written about a cheap thrift-store object make it more valuable?

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How much money would you pay for a porcelain figurine of a foppish, mustachioed man holding a dove?

What if I told you this particular figurine has a story behind it -- it's modeled after a real, historical person. And it's a family heirloom, of sorts.

Now what if I told you that the story of the figurine was entirely made up? Would that change your mind about its value?

This all has the ring of a convoluted thought experiment, but it turns out I know exactly how much someone would pay for this figurine along with a printout of the story I invented about it. Last week it sold on eBay (for how much, I'll tell you later) as part of the Significant Objects project, a joint endeavor from journalists/cultural critics Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, who paired writers with cheap, thrift-store objects and asked them to come up with fictional narratives about the items. Now, they're listing the knick-knacks for sale on eBay with the explicit caveat that the "significance" of each object has been invented by the writer.

It's a kind of real-world laboratory for looking at the way we place value on things.

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Walker and Glenn recruited 100 writers (including some big names, like Nicholson Baker and Luc Sante), and the first stories/objects were auctioned in early July. As of Aug. 10, 34 significant objects had sold on eBay, for a grand total of $675.65. The original cost of those 34 items, which Glenn and Walker purchased at garage sales and secondhand shops, was $40. In other words, a 1,589 percent markup.

"In the beginning," Walker says, "I hoped we might be able to sell some of the objects for more than $20, but I thought, 'I'd be surprised if we get more than $5 for a lot of these things.'"

A month into the project, though, the median selling price has been around $15, Walker says. And so far, the record-setting auction was for a small metal boot, with an accompanying story by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. Its original price was $3. The eBay auction ended at $88.

***

So what accounts for the (proportionally) huge increase in the sale price of these objects between the time Walker and Glenn bought them and the time they sold on eBay?

The project's hypothesis, according to Walker, was that there's usually some kind of story behind the things that mean the most to us. "So the question," he said, "was could you just make up a story about an object -- would that add value to it?"

So far, he ventures, "That [hypothesis] has been borne out."

"But that's not the whole story," Walker adds, allowing that any number of factors might influence the bidding on a particular object. The buyer might be drawn in by the fictional account of the item; they might actually like the object itself; or maybe they're a fan of a particular writer, or of the Significant Objects project in general.

They could also be fans of the project's creators: Glenn is the author of "Taking Things Seriously," a book of short essays wherein different writers and artists describe the meaning of an (actual) personal possession that might seem insignificant to others. Walker writes the "Consumed" column for the New York Times Magazine, and his book "Buying In" is subtitled "The Secret Dialogue between What We Buy and Who We Are." Both men, in other words, have a keen interest in the way we assign value to things.

The idea for Significant Objects was born when Walker broke a coffee cup that he'd bought in a diner with his now-wife on a trip to Baltimore. "I started thinking about how little this mug would have meant to someone else, and how much it meant to me," he says.

A key difference between Walker's experience and the idea behind the Significant Objects project, of course, is that the Significant Objects stories do not reflect a direct personal connection to the objects being sold.

The figurine I ended up writing about (Walker e-mailed me photos of three items to choose from) started out as a fun and seemingly low-stakes creative-writing challenge. I invented a story about an eccentric imaginary uncle who'd commissioned a statuette of himself.

But a funny thing happened after the item went up for sale on eBay: I started to get concerned about what it would eventually sell for. If no one bid on the object, did that mean I had failed to add to its significance?

Walker and Glenn are letting the writers keep the money from the objects' sale on eBay, and while I welcome the cash, I don't think I really cared about the money as much as having my foppish figurine sell for a "respectable" price.

But what does that mean? How do you determine a "respectable" price for a piece of thrift-store junk? Did I want it to at least match the average sale price for other writers' significant objects? Or maybe I would be satisfied if my figurine sold for the price of a comparable object on eBay, one that was not involved in Significant Objects (take, for example, the Precious Moments Happily Ever After Figurine, with a "Buy it Now" price of $48. Huh?)

The truth is, I wasn't really sure. I recognized my reaction was irrational. But I still wanted the sale price to go up.

So I e-mailed friends and asked them to bid. I posted the story on my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I tried to find the right tone -- just detached enough to ensure everyone knew I wasn't taking myself too seriously, but literal enough to prompt someone into bidding. In the end, one friend told me she'd placed a bid.

When I checked eBay on day three of the six-day auction for my fop, its price had risen from $1 to $10.50.

I was starting to feel better, which in turn made me feel more foolish for feeling better about the dollar amount next to my fop figurine.

***

When I explained my reaction to Walker, he wasn't totally surprised. He says he suspects that the writers participating in the Significant Objects project aren't really thinking about their reaction to the monetary value that the eBay market will assign their object/story until the bidding starts.

"Suddenly," Walker says, "you've got this dollar number next to this thing, even though it doesn't really mean anything" given all of the unpredictable factors that can influence the final sales.

I asked Claire Zulkey, another participating writer who contributed a story about a Pez dispenser, if the Significant Objects experience had messed with her head, too.

"I was completely attacking the project from a creative perspective," Zulkey wrote to me in an email. "I didn't have high hopes for it -- it's a Fred Flintstone Pez dispenser, and to be honest, if I saw one lying on the sidewalk I probably wouldn't pick it up."

But, she added, "I felt performance anxiety ... I knew that Rob Walker was keeping an eye on it and mentioning it on Twitter, and I was mentioning it, too (via Twitter and Facebook and my website) and the more I mentioned it and the lack of action I saw the more embarrassed I got in case no one bid on it."

In the end, Zulkey's Pez dispenser sold for $5.50, a $5 increase from what Walker and Glenn paid for it.

"I was quite satisfied with that," she said.

It turns out the Flintstone Pez toy was bought by someone Zulkey knows. "I assumed that he was just being kind," she says. But it turned out his wife has a Pez dispenser collection, and he purchased it for her as an anniversary gift.

"Not to sound corny," Zulkey says, "but that element of it is way sweeter to me than the $5. But I won't lie, I cashed that $5 in PayPal money immediately. Times are tough."

***

Walker says his wife reminded him about another phenomenon at play in the Significant Objects experiment: It doesn't take a hundred people to drive up the price of something on eBay. It takes two.

There must have been at least two people interested in my Foppish figurine. In the end, it sold for a $17.82. Make that a respectable $17.82.

Still, I couldn't stop wondering who would pay so much for a fop figurine and its 400-word fake history.

It turns out her name is Susan Clements. She's a 58-year-old ex-banker who happens to live not far from me in Oakland. She came to Significant Objects through her interest in Rob Walker's work.

Walker put me in touch with Clements, and I asked her what exactly attracted her to these baubles and bibelots -- these gewgaws with their invented significance.

Why, in other words, did she bid on my fop figurine?

Clements says she fell in love with Significant Objects project as soon as she saw it, and decided she should support it financially. She says she's fascinated by "the whole idea of what it is that makes us gravitate to something or buy something."

So far, she's been the winning bidder on six Significant Objects. She's set a high-bid limit on eBay of between $25 and $35. In some cases she says she's drawn to the object itself (as with the JFK bust, to which she felt a personal connection), and in other cases the story caused her to look at the trifle in a new way.

This, she says, was the case with the Fop Figurine. "I saw that object and I thought, Oh my God. This is just the weirdest thing ever. The story made me go back and look at object with new eyes."

In a way, Clements says, it doesn't really matter that the objects' significance is made up. "If the writing moves me, it kind of melds with the object," she says, "They sort of become one thing."

Clements' explanation of ascribing value to these seemingly arbitrary objects turns out to be textbook support for one of Walker's theories about the whole venture:

"The funny thing is, whatever the real story of that fop figurine is, it's been completely obliterated ... Whoever really designed it, whatever they really had in mind, whatever their real target market was, whatever meanings preceded -- all that has been obliterated in a matter of a few hours. It enters into this new ecosystem, and the meaning comes out the other side, and it's completed by the buyer."

She didn't realize it, but while Clements was completing that the circle of meaning, she was helping to shore up my self-worth by just a little bit -- by $17.82, to be precise.

My imaginary foppish uncle would be proud.

Do you have a person or topic you'd like to see covered in Money Tales? Let us know. E-mail Rob at rbaedeker@sfgate.com

Rob Baedeker is a writer living in Oakland. He is the co-author, with the Kasper Hauser comedy group, of "SkyMaul," Weddings of the Times," and "Obama's Blackberry."

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